Canada protects trees.
Now protect preborn children.
On June 9, 2026, the council of Terrasse-Vaudreuil, a town of roughly 2,000 people west of Montreal, voted unanimously to recognize that trees have the right to live, to grow and to regenerate. It is the first municipality in Canada, and by the organizers' own account the first in the world, to sign the Universal Declaration of the Rights of the Tree.
The mayor, Michel Bourdeau, explained the decision in words worth reading twice. A tree, he said, is like a human being. It breathes. It lives. It needs water. It protects us.
Every one of those sentences is true of a child in the womb.
The tree now has rights in Terrasse-Vaudreuil. The child has none. Not there, not anywhere in Canada, at any stage of pregnancy, and not since 1988.
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Takes about thirty seconds. Goal: 1,000 signatures.
We are Quebec Life Coalition. We are writing to you wherever in Canada you live, because of something you ought to know about Quebec.
What starts in Quebec does not stay in Quebec.
The record
1969. Henry Morgentaler opens an abortion facility in Montreal, in open defiance of the Criminal Code.
1976. On December 11, Quebec's Justice Minister Marc-André Bédard drops every charge against him, declares the law unenforceable, and announces there will be no further trials. Quebec simply stops applying a federal law.
1988. Twelve years later, the Supreme Court strikes that law down for the entire country. Canada has had no abortion law since. Quebec went first; Canada followed.
1977. Twelve months after closing the Morgentaler file, the same Marc-André Bédard makes Quebec the first jurisdiction in North America to write sexual orientation into its human rights charter. Ottawa gets there in 1996, nineteen years behind.
2014. Quebec becomes the first province to legalize euthanasia, and does it deliberately before the Supreme Court's Carter ruling, drafting the law as "health care" so as to slip past the Criminal Code. Ottawa follows eighteen months later. In 2019 a Quebec court then forces Ottawa to widen the law further.
2021. The Magpie River becomes the first ecosystem in Canada granted legal personhood: nine rights, among them the right to live, to exist and to flow, and the right to regenerate. The resolutions were drafted by a Montreal-based body, the International Observatory on the Rights of Nature.
2026. That same organization welcomes the Terrasse-Vaudreuil resolution, and its president says publicly that she hopes this town will be the first of a great many to follow.
That is not a coincidence. It is a method. Quebec is where these things are tested, and Canada is where they are then applied. Two Prime Ministers understood this perfectly: Pierre Elliott Trudeau, born and raised in Outremont, who opened the door to abortion in 1969, and his son Justin, formed in Montreal and for seventeen years the member for a Montreal riding, who legalized euthanasia across the country. Both did grievous damage to Canada, and both learned their politics here.
So when a Quebec town gives a tree the right to live, please do not file it under curious news from somewhere else. File it under coming soon to a council near you. The same movement is already circulating a model resolution to grant rights to the St. Lawrence River, and openly inviting councils across the country to copy Terrasse-Vaudreuil.
And consider the reasoning, stated plainly by a lawyer for one of the environmental groups involved: corporations hold legal personality, and corporations are not alive; so what is to stop living things from holding it too? Follow that logic and there is no obvious place to stop. Rivers. Trees. Minerals, given time. Exactly one living human being is excluded from it: the one who has not yet been born.
The inversion goes further still. The guardians appointed to speak for the Magpie River were described this way by the very lawyer who designed the model: like parents to a child, they must act in the best interests of the child. They reached for the image of a child to explain why a river deserves a defender. Then they left the actual child out.
The word "irony" is too mild. This is a moral contradiction, and it is sickening.
Now hear us clearly, because we will not be caricatured on this point. We are not against trees. Plant them. Protect them. Terrasse-Vaudreuil has some ten thousand of them and is right to care for them. Yes to the protection of trees, of plants, of animals; we mean that, without reservation and without sarcasm.
But if a tree earns protection because it lives, because it grows, because it needs water and cannot speak for itself, then how much more the child in the womb, who does every one of those things, and who is a human being besides. Cherish her humanity. Recognize her worth. Let her live.
That is the whole of our petition. It asks the Parliament of Canada to pass a law protecting the lives of preborn children. Nothing more complicated than that.
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Why sign if you have never set foot in Quebec? Because the Criminal Code is federal. Abortion is not a provincial file. The Parliament that has declined to act for thirty-eight years is your Parliament, and the members who will receive this petition are your members. Quebec cannot repair this alone. Neither can you. That is rather the point.
So sign it. Then send it to three people who will.
| Sign and pass it on › |
For Life,
Georges Buscemi
President, Quebec Life Coalition
P.S. Terrasse-Vaudreuil acted because a handful of residents asked their council to. That is the whole mechanism. It works for trees. It can work for children.
Campagne Québec-Vie receives no public subsidy and holds no charitable status. This work is carried by the people who believe in it. If you are able, support it here.
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